I haven't read this yet, but from the title I'm surprised that it doesn't mention Kolmogorov complexity. How does Kolmogorov complexity relate to the concepts in this article?

It's probably the most ideal metric but it's impossible to find in meaningful timeframes.

Trying to compress the code may be a proxy for the complexity metric

To steel-man their sentence, it’s a large number to extract from US citizens, nearly $500/person. But it’s a small number in terms of government deficit and current spending

The percents were huge. The income was comparatively useless.

Well said!

I don't mourn our craft.

Command and Control Server (C2) refers to the infrastructure required to command and control malware of various forms.

The author basically found a creative use of Hinge’s infrastructure and proved it could be used to control malware.

But the malware was encoded as an image, how is it runnable on the target's smartphone?

The purpose of command and control servers is to send and receive data to victims devices.

A secondary goal is to do so while evading detection. This is why many threat actors piggy-back off of legitimate services, it disguises the malware communications and avoids directly exposing the upstream C2 instance.

> Congratulations! You're now using Hinge to distribute unassuming abstract expressionist pixel art.

creative platform use

Would be interesting to heard about similar attempts, in particular for other languages like C++.

I'm probably not gonna do it, but just out of interest: What is the syntax?

I'll start a brainstorming/drafting repo once I'm confident in deciding what I want.

Stating my sources of inspiration will win some people and turn off some people: In terms of syntax, Godot's GDScript comes closest to my ideal. In terms of features, Swift.

One thing I really want to try: instead of "functions" I want it to be "event handlers", so instead of

    func doSomething()

you'd say

    on doSomething()

A class instance could "contain" or "own" another class instance at runtime, similar to Godot's node-based hierarchy, and sending the `update()` event/signal to an instance could propagate it down the tree, making it easy to implement an entity+components architecture.

and you could overload handlers based on which type raised the event or emitted the signal:

    on doSomething() by PlayerClass

`caller` would be a keyword/object just like `self` is, in every handler scope so you could see `if caller is Player` or Monster for example.

Most relevant in terms of gameplay, I want `Stat` to be a core type: a number that has a maximum and minimum, and conditional buffs/debuffs affecting the final value, and so on.

Hmm, interesting! Sounds a bit like a DSL for ECS with tight integration of event handling.

There's other out-there ideas that I don't remember seeing elsewhere and I don't know what made me think of them, but I definitely want to try:

For example, let's call it "environments" or "event scopes": If a game entity (class) is in a certain environment/scope, that environment can trap/intercept all events/signals sent to/from that entity.

I'm not yet sure how exactly it would work/look, but I feel like it could be useful for easily implementing complex RPG-like conditions like: "Hitting {purple} {orcs} with this sword on a {Tuesday} night with a {full moon} deals +42 damage"

So none of the base objects need to know about that condition, but the "environment/scope" could impose or "overlay" extra conditions on every event passing through it..

Music being "good" is subjective. A programming language, however, can objectively be better if it allows a subset of programmers to better solve certain problems.

The reason for why OCaml is not more popular, thus, is that this subset is small. The reason for this may be either (a) habit or (b) it's not that much better than other languages. I'm gravitating to (b). OCaml guys seem to be quite dogmatic for the wrong reasons.

The popularity of a language usually translates into better support, tooling and learning materials.

There‘s no way he is not a cartoon villain.

Why "Geometry"? Seems to just be a math 101.

It seems to be the naming pattern chosen for a whole series of such publications: https://geometryof.org/